And we shouldn’t allow this concept to go unchallenged here on Lemmy.
Commenting on an active post is not brigading
Posting a link to something is not brigading
Commenting on something you were linked to is not brigading
The only thing that might be brigading, but isn’t because it isn’t a real thing, is someone explicitly going, “Hey everyone, go here and harass this person”
It’s all fine and good that we have some new rules to keep the peace with other instances but we must fight against 
voting on comments is a broken idea.
there’s this terminally reddit-brained sense I think that even when you’re powerless to argue you can still get a little hit of smug satisfaction by using your power as a vooooter to make your voice heard. I’ve been in too many reddit discussions where the thread is scored 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0 etc because the dumbshit lib I was talking to was shaking with nerdrage and smashing downvote on all of my comments the instant I hit submit
even at its best the whole idea is laughable, that you can use votes as a kind of consensus protocol to figure out which comments are good. I imagine a medieval herald unfurling a big scroll and proclaiming the final tally-
+3 from the few people who are already familiar with the subject
-5 from people who are thinking about this for the first time in their lives and aren’t convinced
-3 from tone police who think the other person was being more civil
-5 from people who vaguely recognize that the comment is arguing against someone on their team and get defensive
-20 from dogpilers who don’t really have an opinion but see that the score is already negative and want to do their duty
public voting breeds annoying echo chambers. everyone looks at the scores to see who’s right and then thinks they’ve learned something even though there’s no signal in there. the notion that whoever happens to be around is even equally qualified to have an opinion on something is kind of a wild leap, and not how anything usually works outside of reddit. that fiction is constantly breaking down and you end up having to police “brigading” and deal with awful power posters getting a huge advantage from name recognition. reddit isn’t stupid and has been trying to unfuck it for the last 10 years with raid detection and crosspost limits and options like hiding scores on new comments. I remember slashdot experimenting to figure out an answer even another decade earlier. on the orange site you need a ton of karma to use the downvote button at all. the default lemmy model of upvoting/downvoting just does not work
I don’t think I ever used reddit again after hex removed downbears, it’s that much better. everything feels different. I mean I still don’t like hex - upbears aren’t great and everyone should be anonymous - but it’s a lot better than reddit
Yeah Reddit’s name could have been “Promote or Censor” because that is literally what the point of the whole site is, and they even have a threshold at which it literally hides the comments and you have to expand it by clicking a barely-visible button
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microblogging services are the gold standard I think, just cause someone’s going to RT/QRT anything worth seeing. mastodon’s local feed is comfy too
Maybe we should also remove upbears?
But I use that number for validation
I like when my silly takes get upbeared, makes me feel supported by the community 🫂
Although it might stimulate more discussion, as comments would be the only way to interact with something
I remain steadfast in my belief that we should replace upbears with react emojis, filled from the emotes we use regularly but are legible when shrunk down.
I was opposed to even having upvotes back in the early months of the site. I still don’t like it, although it does effectively trigger the monkey-brain “number go up” impulse that can drive further posting.
Yeah and we do need some way of surfacing GOOD POSTs